Small Town Girl bombed at the box office. Nick’s ghost might’ve smiled, getting that right. People were more interested in the twists and turns of Maddy’s real life than her movie.
Other than the trial, Maddy dropped off the radar and then appeared on the cover of the November Vanity Fair. Very pregnant. Very beautiful. The backdrop a rippling canvas the cerulean of Lucentology. It tinged her skin and her eyes. She looked otherworldly.
The article allowed her to defend her beliefs while also continuing what Aster had started. The destruction of Horace Walton’s good name.
The scandal had ended his reign as leader of the church. An inner circle of longtime Lucentologists (including Jack Ford) had selected an interim leader – a British woman with a startling physical resemblance to Julie Andrews. Maybe that was by design. Everyone trusted Mary Poppins.
Horace had crept under some rock. The last time anyone had seen him he’d fled a photographer’s lens on a New York City street. Internet rumors held he’d probably get quietly assassinated for failing the church so spectacularly.
In the article Maddy said that love was the most powerful force we knew. Her interpretation of ‘Forward’ meant ‘Love’. And unfortunately love could corrupt like it had with Dad and Horace both.
The reporter wrote that he asked Maddy if she still had room in her heart for either Horace or Dad. Did she love them?
She’d just smiled and said, “Next question.”
Both Dad and Uncle Bob received sentences for kidnapping. They were now felons.
The defense tried to change the venue, but the request was denied. The judge did draw the line at having cameras in the courtroom. The trial was held in Ashmond. The media showed up in droves when Maddy and Jack testified. I managed not to cry on the witness stand. I teared up when the jury read their verdict.
Dad’s lawyer was sure that if Dad kept his nose clean he’d be released after having served just a year. That was his goal. The lost job and lost pension were problems he’d deal with once he’d been released.
Uncle Bob had tried to kill himself, fashioning a noose from torn bed sheets. He’d been moved to a state mental facility. He was doing better now so long as he stayed medicated. I kept putting off my visit.
Will Leasey kept running the farm. Around Eaton they were already referring to it as the Leasey place as though Robert McCall had never existed.
Once Horace was publicly disowned, Ruth Arnett pushed even harder for the investigation into Kip’s death to be reopened. The LAPD didn’t acquiesce. Budget considerations being named chief reason.
She stopped and resumed blogging. Wrote she was trying to focus on a book about Kip, but it was coming slow. She’d taken up boxing to help relieve the tension she accumulated researching the book. Ruth wrote she taped a photo of Horace Walton to the punching bag before she worked it. Even took a picture of the ‘Asshole on Punching Bag’ and posted it to her blog.
She called me every now and then. Usually late at night. Her words slurring, but the core message always a play upon her conclusion that I was one of the only ones who knew what it was like to lose a sister to the fucking blue devils.
I never did find out if Selkie Rosenfeld really had a diary or if Ruth had forged the whole thing, aiming to slip up Horace. The one time I’d asked Ruth she’d chuckled.
The Winks place burned down. Arson was suspected, but no one was ever arrested.
Mr. Pederson was sentenced to life in prison. Maddy and I only ended up testifying one day each. I stayed away otherwise and shushed Sherman and Kitty anytime they broached the subject of the former teacher.
I did hear rumors that on the stand – he insisted on testifying – he was his cheery, cuddly, grizzly bear self. He claimed all his interest in Maddy was nothing but temporary insanity. A split personality.
The jury didn’t buy into it.
Sheriff Younger never really pursued the fact I was a minor living alone. He didn’t have to. Factually, legally, Maddy had become a Washington state resident. The house out on East Jennings a mailing address. What it came down to was she was a resident in name.
I shared the house with Mojo and Jack.
I saw Mojo more than I saw Jack. My famous brother-in-law was busy.
He’d been advised to get to work on Quantum 3 as quickly as possible. Fast track it. People wanted to forget all the ugliness and tragedy surrounding the promo appearance for Small Town Girl. Another go round as a super spy would help the healing process. Jack didn’t listen to his agent.
Instead Jack tapped his friend the Spanish prince and then his own bank account to fund production of The Slipping Point. It was the movie about the farmer, the one he’d been location scouting around Eaton. Jack not only had the lead role - Slip McGown, a screw up trying to hold onto the family farm - but he was also taking that big first step into directing. He told me he had no idea what he was doing most the time. He found the high wire act aspect thrilling, addicting.
My favorite aspect was that he’d formed a production company for The Slipping Point and any other smaller budgeted production he might chose to do in the future. The name he chose for the company: Mojo Pictures.
Jack and Maddy talked by phone and by Skype. She’d forced him to go make the movie while she got closer and closer to giving birth, otherwise his overbearing nature was going to make her head explode.
I talked to her occasionally and always only briefly. The baby. Jack’s amped always on the go hyperness. Safe topics. We were still both too wounded by everything that had happened to move outside those narrow confines.
Local government was thrilled to have a real life movie being filmed here in rural eastern Washington and Oregon, not just Eaton, but Ashmond, Pendleton, Athena-Weston, and other communities benefited from Jack wanting to use the most scenic and atmospheric aspects of the landscape.
A trailer parked on the front yard served as a production office. Jack used the guest room when he didn’t just collapse on the cot stuck in a corner of the trailer. He didn’t crash for long. 5 hours, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more.
There was an alarm system on the house now. So far I hadn’t tripped it and bungled correcting the issue so the cops showed up without need.
Dina escorted Jack back and forth from the set. She’d been the one holdover. Trent and Rocco and Bob and Other Bob, all of them had been let go in the wake of the events of spring.
We were friendly, but not friends. I think having to put her gun on me had definitely altered any path we might otherwise have known.
Dina yawned a lot. I don’t think she liked Jack’s hours so much. She’d become one of Mojo’s favorite people. Dina threw balls and sticks farther than anyone else. Favorite wasn’t strong enough a term. Mojo worshipped her.
Kitty and I didn’t ride the bus anymore. I drove Dad’s car. I’d go pick up Kitty and we’d ride into school together, ride back home, too. Our nicknames around school had become Thelma & Louise. Some people suggested we were lesbians.
Geoff never got over Kitty’s admission about Nick hitting on her. He walked by her in the hallway, pretended not to see her or hear her voice. She thought he was a total prick. And then she’d tell me she missed him so much it hurt.
Early November snow fell from the dark grey clouds. It wasn’t much of a threat to driving conditions. The flakes melted soon as they hit the windshield. Kitty rolled down the passenger side window and tried to catch flakes with her hand as I drove us south on East Jennings.
She was depressed a lot of the time. She’d started smoking, begging me not to tell her mom like that was going to keep Mrs. Ferguson from noticing the horrible breath and the scent of smoke on clothes. She’d tried to talk me into letting her smoke in the car.
“I have to do something in town,” I said. “After school. So I don’t know if I c
an drive you back home. I mean I can, but you’ll have to wait.”
“That’s fine. I’ll just go hang out at my mom’s work until she heads home.”
Before she could ask what I needed to do I said, “Jack wanted me to ask you something.”
She looked at me. Rapt attention like Mojo hearing the cupboard open, the one that held her dog food.
Kitty had developed a crush on Jack.
He’d let his hair get long for the role, and he was sporting a constant five o’clock shadow. He looked like he’d just rolled out of bed. Kitty said long hair and the incoming beard factor seriously bumped up Jack’s screwability. Her crush, god help us, was about to get crushier.
“He had to leave early this morning because they’re shooting in Pendleton. So he asked me to ask you.”
“Uh huh.”
“He wants you to be in the movie.”
Several seconds passed before she said, “Nuh uh.”
“No. Really. He does.”
She laughed. She looked out the windshield, her right arm still sticking out the window.
“It’s for the scene where Slip stops at the little grocery store in between his place and town. The store where he saw the mystery woman that’s driving him nuts.”
“Ok.”
“He wants you to be the clerk. At the store.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit.”
“You have one line of dialogue. Maybe two. You say ‘No. I haven’t seen her.’ or ‘No. Sorry, Slip. I haven’t seen her.’ They’re shooting it over the weekend. Little store outside of Pomeroy somewhere I think.”
“Get the fuck out.”
“He said he knew it was short notice. He apologized for that. They had to shift it around in the schedule all of a sudden. If you can’t do it, you know, you can’t do it. I’ll tell him.”
Silence. I slowed down as the snow started coming down harder and visibility decreased.
“You’re full of shit,” said Kitty.
“What got you the part,” I said, “he saw you and Mojo. The faces you make at her. I don’t think he wants you to make faces, but he thought you have a certain, I don’t know. A photogenic thing. Ask him. He’s the director. I don’t know what he sees.”
I steered through a wide curve and the gravel road was replaced by asphalt. The turn brought us moving horizontal to the system and snow thread rapidly through the open window.
Melting flakes clung to Kitty’s hair when we parked at school and she finally got the window rolled up. The rest of the day she seemed to be walking several inches above the ground.
The trace amount of snow clung to the ground through the morning, but had melted by afternoon.
We talked about snow and the days getting dark so early when I stopped in at Nan’s KnickKnacks, the sewing store downtown. It also served as Eaton’s floral shop. I didn’t know if it was Nan I talked to, or some other elderly lady that got me a single rose from the case against the wall. She asked me twice if I was sure I didn’t want her to slice the thorns off. She worried I might cut myself. I assured her I would survive.
I drove to the southwest corner of town and parked on the roadside and then walked up onto the cemetery grounds. Come fall, they closed up at 5 PM, and in full out winter, dusk.
The cemetery was on a hillside with a slowly rising slope. The grass wet from the melted snow, saturated in some spots. The clouds hung low, but moved over us at a fast pace like they were the belly of a dutiful reptile focused on sliding over the ground.
That Wednesday, Dorothy Carolyn McCall would’ve been 54.
Her mother, my grandmother, had died from a heart attack when she was only 58.
Mom said she didn’t know why it was, but apparently our blood was just meant to help keep the median lifespan for women a little modest.
There was space next to her resting spot set aside for Dad.
I set the single rose down in front of the headstone. I knelt my right knee down onto the grass. The moisture saturated the denim.
“Dad can’t be here,” I said. “I don’t know if you know why. I don’t know if anything that happens here has any meaning for wherever you are. Whatever it is you might be doing.”
I picked the rose back up and pressed the meat of my thumb against a thorn, trying to think of anything else at all that I might say. Or just think anything. Dad would spend a good quarter hour at Mom’s side on her birthday and their wedding anniversary. I didn’t know if I could do that. My mind would wander. That seemed disrespectful.
“Anna. Honey.”
I looked over my shoulder. A girl of 4 or 5 in a bright blue coat and mittens and boots stared at me. She was all eyes and curly brown hair. Her father walked behind her, a man in glasses with sand-colored hair, a bouquet in hand.
He smiled at me.
“Sorry. She stares sometimes.” To the girl he said, “Anna. Let’s keep going. Let the nice lady alone. Let’s go and see Mom, ok?”
He lightly touched her shoulder. Anna sniffled mightily and then tromped on ahead of her father towards the headstones in the northwest corner.
Once they reached their destination the father knelt. I could only see the top of his head for the hillside incline and the markers between us. Anna stood in this opening between the rows of stones. She looked back at me and then at her father.
He stood and his hand went to his face. He bent his head down like he might be pressing fingers under his glasses and into his eyes. Anna looked up at him and then she embraced his leg, she held tight, and tighter still it seemed when he reached down and mussed her head of curly hair.
Back in the truck I started the engine and I inspected the single bead of blood bloomed on my thumb. I pressed it to my lips and tasted the coppery smear and then I drove home through town and the darkening countryside.
THE END
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Also by Brian Stillman:
The Lipless Gods
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